Today’s link is a companion to my earlier post with resume advice. After resumes come interviews, and in those you’ve got to ask your interviewer a few questions. When you’re just starting out it’s really hard to know what’s okay to ask or what you would even want to ask. Fortunately Jen Hamilton compiled a fantastic list of questions to ask interviewers from various sources (they’re linked at the bottom) and.. Read More

I was poking around in /r/javahelp, saw a question about something I haven’t personally done, and found what I strongly suspect was the answer right away. I try to explain how I found the answer when I answer questions like that because “oh it’s _____” isn’t really that helpful in the long term. I mean, what is the question asker supposed to do next time if I’m busy or sick or on vacation? But.. Read More

Today’s tip is a very simple git feature that I always seem to forget. Maybe by putting it on my blog I’ll finally remember it exists! What this does is force your local branch to really for really real match the state of the remote branch. If somebody reverts a bad commit on a remote branch and your local repo insists your copy is a commit ahead of the remote no matter.. Read More

The academic year is ending pretty soon and students are probably starting to look for co-op jobs, so hey, why not throw some unsolicited resume advice at people? First a quick disclaimer, I help review resumes now and then but I don’t have a huge amount of experience with it. Some of the stuff I’m going to tell you is stuff I’m really sure I’m right about, and some of it.. Read More

Today’s link is a set of nifty Chrome dev tools tricks. I don’t know about you but I haven’t done much front end work lately, which means I keep forgetting that things like DOM breakpoints exist. Even if you work on front end code all the time, maybe you’ll find a useful tip in there too :)

The big tip for post #8 in the be a better programmer while still having a life series is to become a witch. A Terry Pratchett style witch, to be precise. Terry Pratchett’s witch characters are really great at two things: first sight and second thoughts. To quote him directly: First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second Thoughts to.. Read More

First, a caveat: I learned this on EC2 instances and make no promises that it will work in any other setup. That said: The recipe runlist is not anywhere in your custom cookbooks, it’s in the layer settings for each layer in your stack. If you add a new cookbook, recipes absolutely have to go in the recipes folder under the [cookbookname] folder. Data that your recipe expects, such as “node[‘datadog’][‘jmx’][‘instances’]”.. Read More

I was talking with a friend who’s learning to code the other day, and the subject of the wall came up. Not the one that keeps the wildlings out, the one everybody slams into when they’re learning to code. Learning to code starts out great, there are so many tutorials that break things down really clearly, but once you’ve got a handle on the basics and want to move on to.. Read More